Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Quote of the Day

"The doctors are not gonna tell you both sides of the issue... they're told by the pharmaceutical industry, which makes billions of dollars, that it's completely safe. The efficacy of these shots have not been proven. And the toxicity of these things -- we're having more and more side effects. We're having more and more autism."

Good news for people who think that posing nude in Playboy and hosting a crappy MTV game show automatically comes with its own PhD in neuroscience: Jenny McCarthy will soon have a daily platform from which to berate the medical community for not taking her advice on treating autism.

Unless you're lucky enough to have mercifully been born deaf, you're probably well aware of Jenny's delightful one-dingbat crusade to find someone or something to blame for her 5-year-old son's autism. For the past couple of years, she's jumped in front of pretty much every television camera and microphone in the continental United States to stir up unnecessary controversy over certain childhood vaccinations by proclaiming her belief that there's a link between them and autism and shouting down anyone who has the gall to doubt her credentials (or, in the case of Denis Leary, to doubt the veracity of the abundance of recent autism diagnoses in this country in the first place). Because, really -- why trust those doctors and their medical degrees when you can listen to Jim Carrey's girlfriend?

There's little as obnoxious in the pop cultural sphere as the celebrity who declares him or herself the all-knowing, unrelenting voice of experience on a particular subject simply because it happened to have touched his or her life in some way. For every one Michael J. Fox, who's fought Parkinson's with staggering humility and a dignified focus that's truly benefited others, there are ten Jenny McCarthys -- who write books on how gross it is that white stuff sometimes comes out of your vagina during pregnancy.

Actually I take it back; there is one thing more obnoxious: someone who enables that person.

In this case, the one foisting Jenny's show on an innocent public -- the one whose personal largess pretty much guarantees that Jenny McCarthy will be the next big thing in daytime television -- is none other than the event horizon of all human experience: Oprah. No one absorbs, assimilates, then repackages under her own mantle the breadth of existence that Oprah does; if something hasn't happened to her -- it just hasn't happened. Who the hell knows, maybe Oprah assumes that being tangentially associated with someone whose child is autistic will qualify her as an expert on yet another subject currently capturing the public's imagination. She had to have some way to stick her greedy little fingers in the autism pie, seeing as how she won't be getting her own kid, autistic or otherwise, at any point short of chloroforming one at her school in South Africa and sneaking him or her through customs in a giant box marked "make-up."

The real problem is that celebrities of the Oprah and Jenny McCarthy stripe are so used to being deferred to on just about every issue by a sycophantic media that they really have come to arrogantly believe that they're qualified to offer an informed opinion on anything they've Googled once or twice or read an article on while sitting in First Class. When we're talking about, say, Oprah's favorite funnel cake recipe or Jenny's thoughts on the feel of silicone versus saline breast implants -- no harm, no foul. But when they begin playing doctor -- when Oprah hypes the latest trendy Hollywood colon cleanse or Jenny recommends that parents not inoculate their children or touts Scientology-esque "cures" for complex diseases -- that's when things get dangerous.

Nothing Jenny McCarthy has suggested about the link between vaccinations and autism has been proven -- far from it. But Jenny isn't letting that stop her campaign of ignorance. She has her convictions as a mother and her moral certitude as a celebrity.

8 comments:

If you ever want to lose a little more faith in humanity, try reading Jenny McCarthy's posts on HuffPo. The fact that they actually give her a forum is depressing enough, but there are tons of commenters who agree with her. Just in case you ever thought HuffPo readers were intelligent.

As patheitc as the commentors are, my highest level of disgust is reserved for the whorescwho sell themselves and their fellow journaists out by working for free for that woman. We can all claim News Corp is evil but you know what...at least News Corp has never CHARGED college students for an unpaid internship. Only the huffington post will try to get a pulitzer for a writer and then fire them for asking for a paycheck.

I genuinely feel for parents who are so blindsided by a diagnosis of autism that they're desperate to find someone or something to blame. And I have a friend who works with autistic kids who believes that certain therapies and dietary changes, consistently applied, can make a difference in a child's life.

But Jenny McCarthy is the worst kind of moron -- the dangerous kind. She scares the crap out of me.

Yep, it's all about the vaccines.Never mind that if diagnoses have gone up, it's because wowee, we actually know WHAT IT IS now, instead of just labeling kids mentally deficient and institutionalizing them. Nope, can't be medical research involved, must be them there vaccines.And even if it were, I'd rather take a chance on autism than polio. Or smallpox.

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